Part V - The Consequences of Stratification

The four selections presented in this section all deal with the issue of noneconomic consequences of stratification, which may broadly be divided into the visible and invisible categories. The visible category has to do with the effects of the location in different positions of stratification system on the life-style and consumption, while the non-visible category has broadly to do with the effects of the same on personal characteristics as attitudes and personalities. Actually, the title "the consequences ... " may be misleading somewhat, since all the selections presented here are strongly concerned with the reciprocal influences of the stratifiation system and life-style, personalities and attitudes on each other - in another word, the noneconomic differentiation of people due to the class or status division is conceived as both the cause and effects of the latter. In fact, particularly for Bourdieu and Kohn, this reciprocal relationship between the stratification system and their "consequences" are one of the key assertions they are trying to convey.

First, the works looking at the life-style and consumption style distinctions. The work of Thorstein Veblen has been the definitive starting point for most researches dealing with the issue of the relationship between stratification and differences in consumption patterns. While being a highly influential work, the problematic aspect of this work seems to come with the very initial assumption regarding human nature Veblen makes - that is, while Veblen perceives of as the eternal struggle for higher status and honor among people as the absolutely ubiquitous fact existing in all human societies, he seems to attribute the existence of this struggle for honor, prestige and status to the biologically innate dispositions of humans. While sociologists have very little to say about the "ultimate" or "biological" human nature, and grounding of arguments on it may make them somewhat uncomfortable, nevertheless the description of the processes and strategies in this search for honor and prestige undertaken by people is still very much relevant and useful for the contemporary research. Briefly, Veblen has identified the three processes of pecuniary emulation, conspicuous leisure, and conspicuous consumption as the basic strategies in terms of life-style and consumption patterns people adopt to distinguish themselves from those lower in the ranks of stratification ladder and pursue honor. All three of these processes are supposed to be ubiquitous in all types of human society. First, the pecuniary emulation. The basic insight of this concept is that in any human society, the real purpose of wealth seeking is not so much with the material satisfactions it confers, but rather with the social satisfaction of showing off how much one has for the sake of honor and prestige. The implication that can be drawn from this proposition is rather striking: since differentiation from others is the ultimate purpose of seeking wealth, no effort at increasing the overall production of the society as a whole can completely eliminate poverty. Conspicuous Leisure stands for the phenomena that has been empirically observed as very truely exiting in all types of societies excepting the most primitive ones. Labor comes to be regarded as somehow base, and the ability to abstain from labor and engage in leisure comes to be regarded as the mark of high esteem and honor. How is this very true for classical Roman and Greek societies, but for all others to certain extent it seems that "conspicuous labor" has existed for some degree. Conspicous Consumption. Unproductive consumption of goods becomes honorable, as a mark of prowess and perquistite of human dignity. Here, particularly interesting is the concept of vicarious leisure and consumption Veblen develops. That is, as society developes complex system of finely graded hierarchy as in the Medieval Europe, the lesser men come to attach themselves to the greater ones in the form that may be described as retainers or servants, thereby becoming the "vicarious" consumers of the greater men's wealth and leisure time. By so doing, they come to serve as the indices of the greater men's high honor and superior social rank. In the contemporary society, though no longer our society is structured on the basis of lords and vassals, this vicarious consumption is still carried out by wives and children in the family system. Finally, some comparison of Veblen to Bourdieu. It appears that insofar as Veblen seems to define the higher and lower ranks of society on the basis of wealth and income (pecuniary emulation), his stance is somewhat different from the later writings of Bourdieu who gives precedence to the effects of schooling as a key resource controlling the access to cultural capital. Dimaggio notes that Bourdieu's position tended to be confirmed as correct in the empirical research, in that education seems to have better predictive power over income as a predictor of life style and consumption patterns. On the other hand, Veblen seems to have provided Bourdieu with a precious insight which the latter author comes to adopt in his writings. That is, while "tastes" of people of different social standing tends to vary as to what they come to regard as beautiful or worthy, the nature of such appreciation is not so much determined by the intrinsic aesthetic worth of the things in concern but by the social concern of rather arbitrarily decided code of reputability defined for the sake of differentiation from those lower in ranks. In fact, Bourdieu picks up on this idea further to assert that one of the principal difference between those higher in the social rank and those lower is that only the former has the social power needed to define what is to be regarded as culturally worthy - only they have the power to define and content and worthiness of cultural capital for themselves.

Not much will be said about the basic ideas of Bourdieu himself, the notions as the habitus and social space (though this concept does not seem to be fully developed, other than that it is a different sphere of life insofar as different mechanisms of stratification operates) are quite well-familiar. However, it is notable that while Veblen seems to define the stratification system as being quite finely graded and diffuse in structure, Bourdieu seems to have fairly rigid notion of high and low classes comparable to that of Marxism, insofar as their conditions are defined by different habitus, which is in turn defined by different objectively classifiable conditionsof existence. In fact, one of the principal distinction Bourdieu makes is a distinction between Bourgeoise taste and the working class taste. However, the picture of stratification system its relationship to difference in life-style and consumption Bourdieu draws is a bit more complicated than a simplistic dichotomy as such relationship is also depends on the differential composition of cultural and economic capitals different classes have. Thus, within the dominant upper classes there is an opposition in taste and life-style between those with more cultural capital and those with more of economic capital, and vice versa. On the other hand, Bourdieu's work has number of shortcomings. On the theoretical side, while it is effective in showing how the objective condition of existence and the consequent difference in habitus, life-style and consumption patterns feeds back into each other to perpetuate the cyle of social reproduction, there is no sense of social change in his conception. Or, there is the problem of the concept of habitus so rigidly determined by the material condition of existence that in actuality it does not seem to add anything new to the Marxian conception of classes determining superstructure. On the empirical side, the problem is that it is ambiguous as to how Bourdieu's data from the French case should be interpreted regarding the strength of association between the class position and the supposed difference in preferences for food, leisure activities, etc. It seems that depending on the researcher's subjetive position the data could be read either way... In spite of these problems, Bourdieu did seem to have made number of heuiristic contributions.

In the sphere of the "invisible" realm of attitudes and personalities, the work of Melvin Kohn has provided for the influential starting point for others that have followed. The work focuses on the effects of work experience on personalities; some of the important preliminary considerations Kohn make are as follows: We must realize that work affects people's values, self-conceptions, intellectual functioning and orientation to the world above and beyond its effects on the aspects related to that work activity itself, in short the work experience affects the whole of personality. We must be intent on discovering the effects of the organizational and structural content of work on personality, rather than exclusively focusing on the subjective perceptions of work people have. Finally, we must be able to explicitly disentangle which aspects of work affect which aspects of personality.

Given these considerations, Kohn gives a brief exposition of the empirical research design he has conducted to carry out this task - basically, it involves identifying different conditions of work as structurally determined by different "dimensions" of work, and finding the statistical correlation between those different conditions and aspects of values, self-conception, social orientation and intellectual functioning. In this paper of limited length, not all variables can be systematically investigated, so Kohn narrows his focus on one particular variable of work condition he considers to be particularly influential on personality: that of substantive complexity of work. It is the empirically most highly correlated with wide range of psychological variables, among which particularly consequential in terms of social stratification is the intellectual flexibility. What is so consequential about it? For this, the significant (yet methodologically somewhat tentative) finding Kohn makes is the reciprocal relationship between substantive complexity of work and people's level of intellectual flexibility. The insight is obvious - by being in different positions of the stratification system, what may be a small or non-existent difference in mental capacity may be greater and greater due to the very fact that they are in different locations of the hierarchy.

Finally, James Davis' work. The insight from this methodologically fancy work is simple: classes may not matter so much in determining different attitudes, values and orientation to society people have, so that the notion of "class culture" may be rather futile. Some further conclusions are that intergenerational occupational mobility does not seem to have great effects on attitudes and opinions of people; Neither their attitudes and opinions can be explained by the notion of "status consistency", Nor are they due to the parental occupational stratum. We do see some notable yet minor effects of current occupational stratum and educational attainment. Further, consistent with many other similar findings, the background of farm vs. non-farm background does seem to have some statistically significant effects.